Читать книгу Shaman's Dream: The Modoc War - Lu Boone's Mattson - Страница 5

If he looked up, he would be able to see; otherwise there would be only Night’s shadow around him. Now it was dark, and now all would follow. He wondered if he was the one who had killed the girl. He did not need to open his eyes to feel darkness, did not need to listen for snapped twig, scraped stone. He knew the men would come tonight, as if they were tearing at his heart already. He looked for fear there and, sure enough, found it, crouched in shadow, less than a small flame. Nothing would stop this old thing from happening. Yet even as fear’s flame grew and licked toward his throat, he held on to the rightness.

He was lying on the ground, just there where some rocks spilled down to enter the water, but in darkness he could not see that. He lay face down, waiting, breathing the smell of dirt. When his legs had folded on him and he had settled down to wait, he had stretched his body out for almost the only time in his life with his head toward the horizon where Sun had disappeared. He knew it would also be for him the last time. As sleep had overtaken him, it had whispered that finally he could follow. Not now, not yet, but soon.

Now, awakening, he rolled onto his back to look at the star-track, searched for the way his feet might take him as he climbed the back of Night. He would gain the sky-path there to the eastward, would follow across the arc of brightness where the stars grew thick, the small lights of The People who had departed before him and even now were crowding toward Skoksun Kálo -- the Land of the Dead.

The girl would not be far ahead of him.

Ignoring the licking fear, Compotwas Doctor studied the sky, looking into his own heart, searching out what had happened, tracing again in his mind the trail that had brought him here, to this place. Against the line of the horizon, he found the girl’s face. Like that of Keintpoos, her uncle.